STATCOUNTER

March 2016

The title of my book on marketing creativity is All You Need Is A Good Idea!. With 20-20 hindsight, if I could create the title anew, I would leave out the “!” Partially because, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”

I feel the same way regarding “Got it?” headlines. I hereby apologize for any of them I might have used in the past. I don’t mean headlines that literally use the words “Got it?” I am talking about the puns and plays on words that are so shabby, it is as if someone were standing next to you, poking you in the ribs, and asking if you got their “clever” use of language.

Headlines like the one above. “New ways to get it write!” Not enough that they used an exclamation point, but to make certain that you got it, they put the pun in a different color than the rest of the headline. And yes, newspaper headlines do this all the time, “Grave mistake on former mayor’s tombstone.” And of course there are the humorous puns: I bet the butcher that he couldn’t reach the meat on the top shelf. He refused to take the bet, saying that the steaks were too high. But those are different categories. Me, I just talk marketing.

The point is that I really don’t mind puns, (the fancy name is “paronomasia”) if they are actually clever. Heck, I don ‘t mind most things if they are witty. Just be careful of patting yourself on the back as you poke your target in the ribs, to make sure they notice your sharp turn of phrase. The point is not to call attention to yourself, but to the product.

I think highly of inventive marketing. It is not just about the product, the positioning or the advertising, but includes the often taken-for-granted package itself. For example, there are Coca-Cola and McDonald’s happy meal boxes that can turn into VR headsets. And boxes of chocolate that match Pantone color swatches.

And then there’s the Pepsi-light dumbbell packaging, which is a bottle shaped like a, yep, dumbbell. I personally am not a big fan of the idea, but better to be polarizing than bland. For example, this site likes it: ‘As the commercial states, "After all, a product that sells a light way of life deserved a new packaging that showed just that." A bold statement, but one that is pretty clever.’

But Huffington Post strongly disagrees: “The soda brand recently unveiled its newest campaign for Pepsi Light, which is the name for Diet Pepsi in many countries outside the U.S. Depicted is a dumbbell-shaped bottle, and this new design implicitly suggests... well, we’re not sure: That a light weight workout can compensate for an unhealthful drink? That Pepsi is a fitness-forward brand? Whatever it is, we’re not buying it.”

The idea came from Brazilian advertising agency AlmapBBDO, but since I don’t know the creative strategy, I don’t know how well it solved the problem. And while I may not like it, three cheers—or however they celebrate success in Brazil—for being daring. Which is always a good way to go.

So that I might give credit where it is due, I wish I could remember where I saw this. But the point that the blog/article/video made had a wonderful insight. (It is not from this article, but I feel I should give credit to someone.)

The thought was not to concentrate so deeply on consumer demographics, statistics, geography, clicks, or whatever. Rather, just try to turn your brand into a friend of your customer. Yes, I know “friend” is a strange word to use when talking about a business relationship with your audience. But when you think about it, the more your brand is perceived as a friend, the more successful you will be. Because a friend is someone with whom you have a history, is someone you trust, someone who is always there for you, someone who you can count on, who won’t let you down. And if a friend screws up, you trust him to make it right.

And aren’t those the kinds of attributes consumers want when they are deciding which product to purchase, the kind of attributes that can turn a product into a brand.

So whatever you can do to your packaging, your customer service, your return policy, your actual product to make it consumer friendly, the better off you will be. (Doesn’t Amazon’s “super friendly” return policy often make the difference when you are thinking of ordering something.)

KFC is running quite an offbeat campaign. They are using different actors to represent their “mascot,” Colonel Sanders. So far, the actors have ranged from Darrell Hammond, to Norm MacDonald to the latest, Comedian Jim Gaffigan, who was introduced in their Super Bowl ads.

An article in Business Insider quotes the CEO of KFC parent company Yum! Brands, Greg Creed, as saying one out of five people hate the ads. But Creed says that's great news for KFC. "So far the response has been about 80% positive, 20% hate it," Creed said at a conference in New York. “And I am actually quite happy that 20% hate it, because now they at least have an opinion.”

It is what he said next that caught my ear. “You can market to love and hate; you cannot market to indifference."

So true. As I have often said, you can’t bore people into buying. And while you probably naturally prefer that people like your ads, there is something to be said for some of your target audience not being fans of your work. First of all, it means they actually noticed what you had to say. And it is better to have 20% of people dislike what you have to say, rather than have most people not even noticing your ad.

Those 20% may, for whatever reasons, never be fans of your product. So you lose nothing by not appealing to them. And while settling for the cliché, the obvious, the expected may give you fewer negatives, there is no way that bland ads will be persuasive.

It is like the fashionable insight that no matter what you do, half the people will have a problem with it, so you might as well do what you want. Translated to your marketing, the point is that some people will never like what you say, no matter what it is, so you might as well do what you feel is right.

Oh, and below is the Jim Gaffigan commercial. Mark me down as part of the 20% who truly dislike it!

I have enough trouble with grammar so that I stand in awe of those who actually know the rules. I usually rely on the “does it sound right” school of sentence structure, with occasional forays onto grammar sites. But I couldn’t tell a gerund from a dangling preposition, if my headline depended on it.

And it is so much easier to spot an error in other people’s writing than to catch a mistake in my own work. Psychologists probably have a name for this malady, but I probably wouldn’t be able to pronounce it correctly. But I do think you have to be careful when you break the rules. You have to be really certain that whatever conventions you flout will make your idea better, and not just confusing.

For example, Apple came up with “Think Different.” As Wikipedia puts it, "Think different" is not grammatically correct: if "different" is considered a modifier, then it needs to be conjugated as an adverb, making "think differently" the accurate phrase. According to Jobs's official biography, "Jobs insisted that he wanted 'different' to be used as a noun, as in 'think victory' or 'think beauty.'" Jobs also specifically said that "think differently" wouldn't have the same meaning to him. Also, Jobs wanted to make it sound colloquial, like the phrase "think big."

Well, Jobs of course, could do as he pleased. But I wonder who came up with this tag line for Cadillac. And what the heck does it mean? “Dare Greatly.” Are they trying to say to dare great things? To take chances greatly? That greatly rewards await those who dare big?

I have no idea, and except in the context of this blog, I really don’t care a great deal. Or even a greatly deal. But, as that old TV show used to caution, “Be careful out there.”